MIDI Controller Projects

Small MIDI Controller

Larger MIDI Controller

Colored LEDs on the larger MIDI controller

Being back home for the holidays, its fun digging up old projects!

Here are a couple of arduino based MIDI controllers I built about 2009-2010. I wanted something really basic – a MIDI controller based around a couple of faders I could assign freely to things like volume control. I wanted to add to that some more creative inputs – a joystick and an IR sensor – for controlling more expressive functions.

The large controller was very much a learning experience, as I did virtually everything in it on my own. The circuit boards I designed and etched in ferric chloride solution, and I scratch wrote all the display code for the led matrices. Quite a time-consuming task! I probably wouldn’t go about doing a project like this in the same way again, but I got a lot of know-how out of it.

It’s fun to have something with lots of different input types but it is prone to some loose electrical connections now and then. The mini controller, on the other hand, I just threw together so I could have something to take on the road. The programming was trivial by comparison. It’s quite a bit sturdier too, though I wouldn’t want to spill a beer on it!

Hi Elias! Both of these projects use custom circuit boards etched DIY style. The large one is quite complicated, but the smaller one would be easy to do with pre-punched protoboard if etching is too much of a hassle! Sparkfun also makes a nice pre-build MIDI shield with a couple generic pots and buttons built in which would accomplish much the same thing.